Soccer has more goals for its fans

Different ends: English soccer fans, above and below right, see the end of each season differently from AFL supporters, below left, thanks to the tension of promotion and relegation battles.

Cellar dwellers need something to live for, writes Richard Hinds, a long-suffering fan of an AFL team currently at the wrong end of the ladder.

A point at Plymouth, a win at home against Swindon Town and even then, depending on what Bristol City does, it could still come down to the last fixture at Sheffield Wednesday to find out if we have automatic promotion or are thrown into the lottery of the play-offs again.

And if that doesn't mean anything to you, then you are probably one of the 19,999,834 Australians who haven't been checking the internet at some ungodly hour on Sunday morning following the progress of Queens Park Rangers in their agonising division two promotion struggle.

More likely you are a fan of a mediocre NRL team such as Manly who, after just six weeks, already seemed condemned to playing out another season with grim resignation.

Or maybe you follow Richmond, the only AFL club that sells flammable membership tickets to cater for fans who traditionally put a match to them by about round six.

No matter how you regard the game of soccer itself, at this time the English league - and Spanish, Scottish and Lithuanian leagues, for that matter - have one great advantage over our local codes. They might have limp 0-0 draws. But the rest-of-the-world's game also has the knee-knocking prospect of promotion and relegation dog-fights to keep the season alive.

For those patriotic Australians whose interest in the Premier League has been excited by the exploits of Mark Viduka and (until this season) Harry Kewell with Leeds United, the dark delights of the relegation struggle are now well known.

They will be particularly aware that, for the big clubs such as Leeds scratching to maintain their natural place in the top flight, the prospect of demotion carries with it the added threat of financial ruin and the decimation of playing stocks. If he can't pull Leeds out of the mire for a second consecutive season, it is short odds Viduka will be in different colours, perhaps in a different country, by June.

But if the prospect of the drop is grim, it also means there is something other than blind loyalty to keep the fans turning the turnstiles - even when the closest they will get to silverware this year is walking past their grandmother's antique sideboard.

Contrast this with the cellar-dwelling NRL clubs, who will limp through the second half of the year uninspired by their lame-duck coaches and watched by a dwindling handful of disillusioned fans.

In some respects, things are worse in the AFL because clubs are rewarded by a draft system that dictates last shall pick first.

This encourages clubs to drop like stones rather than putting up even a facade of respectability. Indeed, the worse you do, the better, because a club that wins five games or less will be given a bonus pick, which could ensure the first two selections in the draft, depending on whether another team is equally lamentable.

This is no match for soccer's carrot-and-stick system, whereby only the fingernails of fans of mediocre mid-table teams are safe near the end of the season.

Sadly, our small population cannot support the multi-tiered NRL and AFL competitions that would be required for a promotion and relegation system.

This seems a shame to those of us now following the fortunes of our chosen soccer teams - in this case, QPR's struggle to win promotion to division one and move closer to what would be, to be honest, not really their rightful place in the Premier League.

Rangers' brief glory days came in the 1975-76 season when, with the help of a sublimely gifted waster called Stan Bowles, the famous Rodney Marsh who wasn't the Australian wicketkeeper and a likely type named Terry Venables, they finished second in the old division one to Liverpool by just one point. After that there was an honourable FA Cup final defeat to Ossie Ardiles's Tottenham in 1981 and a few years spent clinging to division one/Premier League status before they dropped and dropped again.

Last year, QPR made a late surge to the second division play-offs but, iniquitously, had to concede home-town advantage to Cardiff City because the game was scheduled for the Millennium Stadium.

Early in the morning before the game, the entire QPR squad was evacuated from its hotel after someone let off the fire alarm. They lost 0-1.

But you could hardly blame the Cardiff fans for their enthusiastic support of the team.

While Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United might dominate the competition, there is something grand at stake for the battlers. And that is something that can't be said here.